On the specific quality of sadness in Edward Yang's Yi Yi (2000) and what produces it.

Yi Yi runs three hours and has no single narrative focus: it follows three generations of a Taipei family — the father, the mother, the grandmother, the teenage daughter, the eight-year-old son — across a year of their lives. Nothing dramatic happens. This is part of the point.

The sadness that Yi Yi produces is not the sadness of a tragic event but the sadness of ordinary life observed with total attentiveness: the sadness of recognizing that most lives are mostly composed of things that are neither dramatic nor trivial but persistently, quietly significant.

The eight-year-old Yang-Yang takes photographs of the backs of people's heads, because people can't see their own backs and he wants to show them. This image is the film's formal argument: the camera is doing what Yang-Yang is doing, showing people something they cannot see for themselves.

What it shows is time: the father's midlife recognition that he has lost something he cannot name; the daughter's first experience of love and its complications; the grandmother who cannot be roused, receiving the family members' stories every day without being able to respond.

Yang died in 2007. Yi Yi is his final film. The sadness of watching it now includes the sadness of what was not made after it.